2013 Forbes Billionaires List

Well the 2013 Forbes Billionaires List is out and I missed again. Dish's Charlie Ergen is tied for #100 this year at $10.6 billion with a German and a Brazilian, just $0.1 billion behind Steve Jobs wife and family. Rupert Murdoch is at #91.

Thirteen years ago, I installed a satellite dish for someone on the Forbes 100 list. His last name is Lauder. When I say that name, almost no one recognizes it, but then when I further say that you have heard of his mother, most people usually do recognize it.

He had a townhouse in Georgetown that he hadn't been to in about five years, but he kept it staffed 24/7 so it would be ready just in case he ever came to town. The plants were watered daily, the silverware was polished, the clocks wound, etc. etc. They even put fresh fruit in the bowls.

I was told by the "personal assistant" who had engaged my services that this Mr. Lauder doesn't talk to the contractors, so while every effort would be made to make sure that none were present when he arrived, if he ever was there when I was working, I wasn't to speak to him. I got a kick out of that. I was the exclusive satellite services contractor at the nearby Ritz Carlton condominium at the time, and I had a dozen rich customers there who weren't quite as rich as he was but they were nearly all more famous, and I doubt that any of them would have traded their station in life for his. I came out at midnight one night to reconnect Michael Jordan's DirecTV service that a Comcast technician had inadvertently disabled. I had prepared some clever Sam Bowie barbs but didn't find any way to work them into the conversation. Coincidentally, another customer of mine from that era - not wealthy, but noteworthy - was the former Utah Jazz player Jordan had shoved out of the way before making the Finals clinching shot in 1998. And on another service call there, Doug Collins and I talked about how the United States basketball team got screwed out of the Gold Medal in 1972. I even arranged to get Harry Reid access to the Brigham Young channel. If Lauder had arrived while I was working on his TV system, I would have slapped him on the back and invited him out for a beer.

Last time I checked, he and his brother were no longer in the top 100. His brother's wealth had stayed about where it was, at around $4 billion, while his own fortune had since declined by about a billion, but basically, the field got richer.

Coincidentally, another customer of mine from that era - not wealthy, but noteworthy - was the former Utah Jazz player Jordan had shoved out of the way before making the Finals clinching shot in 1998. .

...Coincidentally, another customer of mine from that era - not wealthy, but noteworthy - was the former Utah Jazz player Jordan had shoved out of the way before making the Finals clinching shot in 1998. ...

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acostapimps said:

Bryon Demetrise Russell

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Not wealthy? I guess earning $25.8 million in 13 years is chump change. :lol:

Bryon Russell got a good deal renting a million dollar McMansion that the developer got stuck with. The developer had built that house as the showplace unit in a McMansion development, but he wasn't able to get the "curb cut" it needed to allow its driveway to connect to the main road as planned, so that house is now "backwards" on its lot. Its living room picture window wound up being within about three or four feet from the access road they had to route past it, so unless their curtains were pulled you could look in on them from your car when driving by.

My customers at the Ritz in that era included the founder and CEO of Federal Express, one Saudi Prince (there are a lot of them... but they are all rich), the rather reclusive minority owner of a professional sports team, the director of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a full partner in the first law firm to ever exceed one billion dollars in annual revenue, a very large Hughes share holder and board member, and a certain female soccer player who just had to be able to see the Boston Red Sox games, so I arranged to have her "live" in the Boston area.

It also included some infamous people. The Ritz Carlton is like Miami or Las Vegas. Its motto should be "your money is welcome here". Not like in Boston, where there are places where you had to have descended from the Mayflower landing party to get in. Four of my customers there were very suspicious, but that number got abruptly reduced to three just hours after the 9-11 attack, as one of them, identified as, "Sir Jonathan _____" on a $550 invoice that never got paid, got grabbed by the FBI or someone before noontime and was never heard from again.

Two of those above referenced customers were "comped" by DirecTV. You can't believe what a pain in the butt that was to deal with. Their accounts could only be accessed by a DirecTV vice-president, so when I came out to address a minor subscription problem one of them was incurring one evening, I was told that I could only have that account serviced during daytime business hours. Ironic that the billionaire subscriber could not get the same late-night service on her free DirecTV subscription that her driver and gardener could surely get on theirs.

When I hit 40 I started working on my second million because I didn't make my first million goal. Unfortunately I retired before I reached my third million goal. Now i occasionally play the lottery hoping for an extra $1,000....

When I hit 40 I started working on my second million because I didn't make my first million goal. Unfortunately I retired before I reached my third million goal. Now i occasionally play the lottery hoping for an extra $1,000....

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With my luck, I truly believe that if a thousand tickets were sold for a million dollar lottery and I bought 99% of them, I'd still lose. Or have a heart attack and expire on the spot.

Back when the Massachusetts Megabucks had just 36 numbers, my uncle found a way to "cover the board" He bought 1-6, 7-12, 13-18, 19-24, 25-30 and 31-36. it didn't work. Worse yet, even if it had worked he still wouldn't have become rich because according to a Massachusetts lottery publication of that era, the top horizontal row (1. through 6) the six vertical columns (1, 7, 13..., 2, 8, 14 ... etc) and the two diagonals (1, 8, 15, 22, 29, 36 and 6, 11, 16, 21, 26, 31) were each played approximately ten thousand times each week and the other horizontal rows were played thousands of times. There was a statutoty minimum payout if too many people picked the winning number but it was paltry.